How to Report a Rape in India

A woman at a protest against the recent gangrape of a young woman in New Delhi, Jan. 7.

Last month, a brutal gangrape and assault on a 23-year-old woman in Delhi resulted in her death, while a woman in neighboring Punjab committed suicide after being allegedly humiliated by police as she tried to file a gang rape complain.

These episodes drew attention to how difficult it is to report rape cases in India.

Yet, several court judgments have provided guidelines for how law enforcement and doctors are meant to respond when a woman comes forward to report a rape, say legal advocacy groups. Coupled with recent criminal code changes, these recommendations would do a lot to make the process of reporting rape less traumatic, but aren’t sufficiently well publicized to police forces and hospitals, lawyers say.

Here is what the law says should happen when a woman comes forward to report a rape, and what she is entitled to during the process. A Delhi police spokesman in an interview offered a brief explanation of its process, but did not respond to e-mailed requests for a copy of written guidelines that the police are supposed to follow in rape cases. He did not confirm whether written guidelines exist.

1.Legal assistance: According to a 1994 Supreme Court judgment, as soon as a woman approaches a police station with an allegation of rape, the police ought to inform her that she is entitled to legal counsel to help her file a case. The lawyer should also assist her in other ways, such as in getting medical care.

“The police should be under a duty to inform the victim of her right to representation before any questions were asked of her and that the police report should state that the victim was so informed,” the ruling says. A list of lawyers willing to help with these cases should be available at every police station, it adds. (Delhi Domestic Working Women’s Forum v. Union of India, Oct. 19, 1994)

2. A female police officer: Every station is meant to have a female officer not below the rank of head constable available around the clock, according to a 2009 Delhi High Court judgment. (Delhi Commission for Women v. Delhi Police; April 23, 2009, W.P. (CRL) 696/2008)

In recent days, the home ministry, which is responsible for the Delhi police, has promised to make sure that this provision is enforced and to increase the number of women officers in Delhi police stations to nine.

This will require recruiting more female police, as well as retraining and reassigning existing officers. Delhi has about 5,000 policewomen, according to the National Bureau of Crime Statistics. The city has about 180 police stations, according to the Delhi police website. In order for the same thing to happen in other states, state governments would need to take similar action on recruiting more female police.

The assumption is that policewomen are more sensitive to women’s issues than their male counterparts. But having female police alone is not enough, says Afreen Siddiqui, a consultant for the New Delhi-based legal rights advocacy group Lawyers Collective who has worked on rape prosecutions in the past. Women police officers, like the men, also require training on how to treat sexual assault victims, she said.

Ms. Siddiqui remembers a case several years ago in which a 13-year-old girl alleged she had been abducted and raped by a rickshaw-puller. Both the girl and her alleged attacker had to be presented in court by police. For the journey there, a female police officer made the girl sit next to her attacker in a police vehicle, even though an additional vehicle was available, and despite a court order that a victim should not be brought into contact with her attacker.

3. Immediate medical treatment: If a woman decides to approach a hospital for care after a sexual assault, doctors should immediately treat her for physical injuries and collect evidence, whether or not she decides to report the allegation to police. Doctors should treat the victim before insisting that she file a police report, says a 2000 Supreme Court ruling.

“Such a refusal to conduct the medical examination necessarily results in a delay in the ultimate examination of the victim, by which time the evidence of the rape may have been washed away by the complainant herself or be otherwise lost,” said the judgment. (State of Karnataka v. Manjanna, May 4, 2000, Appeal (Crl.) 1911/1966)

Delhi spokesman Rajan Bhagat said that when a woman comes to report a rape, the police immediately call a counselor from a network of nonprofits that have been working with the police for several years. Together, they take her to the hospital.

According to the Indian Code of Criminal Procedure, the medical exam should be conducted by a registered doctor at a state-run hospital, but can also be conducted by a registered private doctor when the victim doesn’t have access to a government doctor. (Section 164A, Indian Code of Criminal Procedure)

In their manual for sexual assault examinations, the Center for Enquiry into Health and Allied Themes, a Mumbai-based health-rights group, says police should make a point of taking a woman to the nearest hospital. Over time, police have tended to use a handful of government hospitals – rather than the closest one – even when that means several hours of travel time for a traumatized rape victim, says Ujwala Kadrekar, a lawyer at CEHAT. Delays in getting to a doctor also means forensic evidence may be lost.

One reason that police may prefer to go to particular government hospitals is that, apart from Section 164A and a medical form issued by the Health Ministry department that oversees state-run hospitals, the government hasn’t laid down guidelines for this examination to be conducted uniformly across the country, according to a health official.

“Every hospital has its own manual or set of guidelines,” said the official.

So police may prefer to go to hospitals such as New Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences or Safdarjung Hospital, with which they already have a working relationship. Government hospitals also usually have constables on site.

A spokesman for AIIMS, the country’s largest state-run hospital, didn’t respond to queries on how it examines rape victims; a spokesman for Safdarjung hospital declined to respond.

As part of the medical exam, many rape victims, particularly unmarried and underage ones, are often made to undergo a vaginal exam, also known as the “two-finger test,” human rights groups say.

The test is apparently used to determine whether the woman being examined has had regular previous sexual experience. It is not clear why this information is sought, since Indian courts have observed this information is irrelevant and the Indian Evidence Act no longer allows a rape victim’s credibility to be compromised on the ground that she is “of generally immoral character.” (Section 155, The Indian Evidence Act)

Women have the right to refuse the two-finger test. In its manual, CEHAT advises doctors against conducting the test, saying its results don’t speak to whether an assault has taken place or not and are often used against the victim in court in spite of the amendment mentioned above.

Doctors must fill in a form (page 1, page 2, page 3) every time they examine a person who they suspect has been sexually assaulted. If a case is pursued, the investigating officer is provided a copy of the report. The form, which was revised in 2011 after the National Commission for Women raised objections to the test, states the vaginal exam should be conducted only “if medically indicated.”

4. Privacy: The victim’s statement should be taken down in private, preferably in the presence of a family member, except in cases of incest, says the 2009 Delhi High Court judgment. The identity of the victim cannot be made public.

The judgment doesn’t elaborate on what would constitute privacy. In this useful “top 10″ list of legal rights for women, many of which also pertain to reporting rape, The Hindustan Times says that “only one police officer and woman constable” should be present, and it should be done in a location where they conversation can’t be overheard.

Police forces need to have written guidelines for how such questioning is done, said Rajat Mitra, one of the founders of the Delhi-based organization Swanchetan, which provides support to victims of violence. Presently “it’s the personal discretion of the police officer how they ask questions,” said Mr. Mitra, calling it a real “gap in the criminal justice system.”

He believes it would be best if police forces set up special units trained to deal with sexual assaults. “Dealing with children, dealing with women requires you to ask specific questions,” said Mr. Mitra. “These are specialized interviews and cannot be done in a randomized manner.”

One of the reasons that training is required is so that the police can get specifics about the sexual assault that are vital for the investigation and prosecution – without humiliating the victim.

Currently, because of the general discomfort with talking about sex, let alone sex crimes, many police reports record only very general statements about the nature of the crime, such as “a wrong thing” or “a dirty thing” was done. When crime reports are recorded so vaguely, it makes it extremely difficult for the prosecution to secure a conviction, said Ms. Siddiqui, the Lawyers Collective consultant.

This is why it may make sense in some cases to record a victim’s statement at home or at another place of her choosing, an option available since 2009. (Section 157, Indian Code of Criminal Procedure)

But Delhi already had a unit set up to assist rape victims. That included a 24/7 hotline (011-2337-0557), which comes programmed on mobile phone chips issued in Delhi. That number could not be reached this week. Instead, calls received the recorded response: “The dialed number could not be connected at this moment. Please try later.”

Shobha Vijender, the head of Sampurna, a nonprofit that works with the Delhi police to offer counseling in northwest Delhi, said that organizations working with the counseling system do their best to attend swiftly to every referral, even at night, as well as carry out subsequent visits. But she noted that the system is severely underfunded, and counselors are mainly reimbursed for their transportation costs. The Delhi Commission for Women, which has oversight for the crisis centers, couldn’t be reached for comment.

Delhi organizations such as Swanchetan, founded in 1999, and the Center for Social Research, which has four counseling centers, offer services to woman who approach them directly as well as those referred by the police.

In Mumbai, CEHAT can connect victims to counseling, and the Majlis Legal Center has recently begun offering rape counseling.

A nationwide list of such counseling centers is hard to come by – a link offering such a compilation on the website of the Center for Social Research is broken.

“There are actually very few organizations who do this,” said Swanchetan’s Mr. Mitra. “Rape counseling is something that requires very specific skills. It is not part of the syllabus in Indian universities.”